If you are checking in because you are just dying to know what my Random Act of Kindness was for Day 22, THAT I can deliver: I bought a hot dog for a homeless woman. I once saw a documentary called The Faces of Meth. This girl definitely had The Face of Meth. Since that documentary, I have had an irrational fear of catching a meth addiction, so bringing her a hot dog was actually a big deal for me.

If, on the other hand, you are tuning in for happy news about a successful adoption... I am so sad to say that I cannot deliver. After waiting all day, we received very unexpected news that while the birth parents were still choosing not to parent, a family member stepped in and will be taking the baby.

I will not share more details than that about the particular family dynamics in such a public setting, but suffice it to say that we are absolutely crushed about this decision. I know that we have been calling him the maybe-baby, but in my heart he was just... definitely.
And now my heart feels broken.

I have said from the beginning that if I came all the way here to Manhattan and all I did was help this girl through this time, it would be worth it to me, even if I came away empty handed. I promised myself that I would have no regrets being there to support someone who had no one else. I swore it wouldn't be a waste, no matter what happened.

So, to keep my promise to myself, to make this trip worthwhile, to show this girl some grace and love, I am taking my sister BethAnn's advice and I am going to the hospital tomorrow to bring the baby his things. Clothes, diapers, formula, bottles, pacifiers, bibs, blankets, burp rags, and car seat... All the basics that I brought for him, and I am giving them to the social worker so that my almost-baby can have something from his almost-mama.

So, that is going to be Day 23. I don't know if I will have the strength to do this, and also write it down.

Since July I have been envisioning this day. The day where he would be discharged from the hospital and I would go there and I would have his seat all ready, and the gentlest newborn formula, and glass bottles because the plastic ones have all the chemicals, and I would wrap him tight and snuggle him into me and I would make him mine. I don't know how to walk into that hospital knowing that he is there, and that he still needs two parents, and that he will never be mine.

I will do it. But I don't know if I can write about it. So, if there is no post tomorrow, consider it my moment of silence after doing Day 23's Random Act of Kindness: giving a gift I didn't want to give, because the gift I really wanted to give was a family, a home, and my heart.